COMMENTS
What a garbage article. Where's the control group? Without a control group, this tells us nothing at all. 43% admit to being loners? Sure, why not. Lots of people feel lonely during high school, is this something exceptional about entrepreneurs? It's impossible to tell.
43% were the eldest in the family? Taking the canonical family with 2.4 children, you would expect a 41.7% chance of a random child being the eldest. That looks to me like birth order has no effect on entrepreneurship.
77% don't have business degrees? That means 23% do which looks like a pretty big number to me. How many college graduates are business majors? I bet it isn't 23%.
85% of business owners are sole proprieters? Sounds like a pretty obvious extension of the long tail principle to me.
In short, this is a piece of utter glurge and you should be ashamed for having posted it.
All excellent points. Unfortunately, I didn't conduct the survey.
However, I agree with you, the survey wasn't scientified at all (or if it was, it certainly didn't come out that way in the article).
Being a loner has absolutly nothing in common with feeling lonely.
Shalmanese, you totally beat me to it. I agree that the article is totally stupid.
Good article, but a sole proprietorship doesn't mean that their businesses have no employees, it simply means that the owner and the business itself is one entity, rather than the two being separate, like a corporation. A sole proprietor is free to hire as many people as he wants, he just cannot issue shares in his business like a corporation. Most small businesses are sole proprietorships mainly because you don't need to file paperwork with the state to start one, and you are only subject to normal income taxes on the profits of the business, and not taxes on profits before they are passed to shareholders as dividends.
Well I'm an only child, still a loner, and I left school at 16, so the statistics are looking up for me.
I have to add another point about Sole Proprietorship. The mistake about this term in the article is painful. I agree with an above poster who distinguishes this form of setting up a business from 'limited companies'. However, there's an additional point that makes a sole proprietorship what it is: there is a sole proprietor, or, there is only one owner (as opposed to a partnership, and some other forms of business, such as a practice).
Apologies for my ignorance on the sole proprietorship label. This has been fixed in the original article (and hopefully, also in my brain).
I ran the GSS data (http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/) and I get there being a 45% chance of a random person being a first child from the SIBLINGS dataset.
I ran the GSS data (http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/GSS/) and I get there being a 45% chance of a random person being a first child from the SIBLINGS dataset.